hatrickpatrick

Anyone else noticed it? The layout of these songs is incredibly similar, even the lines

"Console me in my darkest hour"

and

"Even better than the real thing"

Are sung in a practically identical tune...

And the chord progression behind the "you sold your soul / like a roamin' vagabond" line sounds remarkably familiar >_>

(NOTE: I am not in any way dissing the Killers, I am a huge fan of theirs - much bigger fan of U2 but the Killers are a close second)

It makes me wonder though. Is it actually possible to write a completely new tune these days and not plagiarise, even if it's by accident? Look at the whole viva La Vida vs Joe Satriani situation, or the Dani California vs. Tom Petty, Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams vs. Wonderwall, and so on...

Then there's When You Were Young, another Killers hit, IMO one of the greatest songs ever written - but then we discover that the guitar solo was taken from Miracle Drug:



As an aspiring songwriter, this depresses me very much. How can we write anthemic songs in the Day and Age (no pun intended) where there are already so many of them? There are surely a limited amount of ways to get that "massive" effect in a song - are they eventually going to run out?

OrARoundabout

Nah, I don't hear it

LittleBono

They kinda sound the same .. but miracle drug is better (im not dissing the killers, i like them). They certainly arent the first band to 'rip off' another band

intedomine

Never noticed any similarity, and Killers wouldn't consciously rip a band off. Too much integrity.

GirlsAloudFan

Yup, it's a rip off. No doubt about it. Burn 'em at the stake, immediately.

BVS

The first time I heard "When You Were Young" I thought my girlfriend was listening to "Miracle Drug" in the other room, and it made me because she doesn't really care for U2...

These things happen. Conciously, subconciously who knows? Pretty hard to prove.

There are just certain progressions that sound better... and certain artist/ genres will gravitate towards certain structures, it happens.

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^Apparently he did.

MyBloodySleeve

The_Edge89

Then there's this song of theirs called "Midnight Show" which somehow reminds me of "I Will Follow", mostly the drumming and the intro guitar.
And of course John Mayer's "Waiting On The World To Change" which is heavily inspired by "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of".
Some think Keane's "Is It Any Wonder" sounds a bit like Zoo Station and then there's Green Day's tune "Give Me Novacaine" that sort of has a "Bullet The Blue Sky" thing going on and Linkin Park's "Shadow Of The Day" which to some ears sounds like a "With Or Without You" rip off.

All I'm saying is that the list could go on and on. I might feel ripped off as a musician myself sometimes going "Hey! That's exactly my song!" but I know it's merely a coincidence since I rarely share my original work with other people before it's finished and thus it's impossible for people to know that I happen to come up with the exact same chord progression, groove or tempo. It just happens, and U2 is a source of inspiration for many of today's new acts so they might borrow something little from our lads every now and then be it sound, lyrical ideas, melodies and what else.
U2 themselves where accused of ripping of A-ha's "The Sun Always Shines on TV" back in 2000 when "Beautiful Day" was released.
The most recent example of the reverse was probably the "No Line On The Horizon" cover resembling this other guys album cover, I guess?

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief
I don't mind though they're all decent songs. I just want to say that I didn't find these similarities myself so a thank you goes out to whoever were the first to discover it.